Thursday, December 25, 2014

On Christmas day, let's open our newsround with good news for Brontë country. Keighley News reports:

An historic Oxenhope church with links to the Brontë family will share in a £550,000 funding payout from the National Churches Trust to 30 churches and chapels in the UKThe funding from the National Churches Trust includes £15,000 for Oxenhope's St Mary the Virgin Church. Custodians of the Grade II listed building, in Hebden Road, will use the cash to help fund urgently-needed repairs to the church tower as part of a £120,000 project. (...)We'd only asked for £10,000 because we didn't want to appear greedy, but they said they liked what we were doing and that we could have the full £15,000. It is amazing."Reverend Wright added that the church's exposed location means it often gets a battering from harsh weather sweeping down off the moors. (...)In 1845, Reverend Patrick Brontë, father of the famous novelist sisters Charlotte, Anne and Emily, appointed the then curate, Reverend Joseph Brett Grant, to take charge of the newly formed ecclesiastical district, now know as Oxenhope village parish.Reverend Grant began holding services in a nearby wool combing shop. Within a year he had raised enough money to build a day school, which served as a Sunday school and church.He was a tireless worker who collected money for a purpose-built new church. According to Charlotte Brontë he wore out 14 pairs of shoes in his quest for money.His efforts were rewarded on February 14 1849 when the foundation stone for St Mary's was laid.The church was built from millstone grit with stone and natural slate roofs. The square west end tower is 44-feet high and houses two levels of meeting rooms, which were added in 1991. (Miran Rahman)

Is this the place to mention that I’ve never read “Tristram Shandy”? Possibly not. Then I might have to cop to never having read a novel by anyone named Brontë, or why I thought the novel of the moment, Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” had a focus-grouped-for-the-ladies’-book-club feel to me. (Alex Beam)

This other columnist from Westport News is exactly the opposite. Writing about his favourite novels:

"Wuthering Heights" (Emily Brontë): Loved this one so much as a kid my sister took to calling me "Heathcliff." (Hank Herman)

The type of book: The old fashioned buttoned-up GothicWhy it can attract Grinchery: For every reader who loves heroes like Mr. Rochester or Heathcliff, there is another reader who finds them to be insufferable asses. If you are in the second category of readers, then you probably skip novels of this ilk. Byronic heroes abound; brooding around moors and the cold halls of manor homes. Also, the prose tends towards the stiffly formal.The one you should give a chance: Rebecca by Daphne Du MaurierIf you don't like Mr. Rochester or Heathcliff, chances are you probably still won't like Maxim de Winter. However, although Rebecca is in the same vein as its predecessors, it's almost the Weird Fiction version of the buttoned-up gothic. It's nuttier, creepier, and more unexpectedly humorous.

There's a whole subgenre of classic lit reimagined for the Facebook generation, like The Autobiography Of Jane Eyre and the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, based on Pride And Prejudice, which started out on YouTube before spawning a book.

Focus (Germany) contains a Brontë in a Christmas Quiz (but it's not the right answer):